Until recently, the carcass of a military helicopter stood on a concrete apron at Cockerill Barracks in Freetown. The helicopter was a Hind, a Soviet gunship of the type that fought the mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan, a machine whose twin bubble canopies are, in a smaller world, as archetypal an example of 20th-century design as the Anglepoise lamp.

The engines and rotors were gone, but inside the cockpits tickertape labels were still fastened to the instrument panels, glossing the Cyrillic rubrics into English for the benefit of the anglophone mercenaries who flew the machine during Sierra Leone's civil war. "Guns … rocket burst," the tickertape read.

The Hind is gone now. The mechanics of its departure are uncertain. Servicemen at the barracks say the Israeli businessmen who cannibalised it for parts removed it. But the fact of its disappearance from Sierra Leone's military headquarters is significant. It is one of many examples of the relics of war fading away in the small west African state.

On Thursday, the verdict will be announced in The Hague in the trial of Charles Taylor. Though formerly president of Liberia, Taylor is accused of war crimes in neighbouring Sierra Leone. In the 1990s, the former British possession on the elbow of west Africa experienced one of Africa's most brutal civil wars. The 11-year conflict left 50,000 dead.

The UN-backed special court for Sierra Leone will probably convict Taylor, although the extent of his direct engagement in Sierra Leone is a matter for debate. In Sierra Leone, it is now also 10 years since the end of the civil war, a development that came about in large part due to the deployment of British troops. A decade on, peace has held, but the state of the nation is a complicated matter.

Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, Sierra Leone's minister of information, says his government is keenly awaiting the verdict in the Taylor trial. "Our position is very clear. Charles Taylor was one of the people who put in place the structures that led to civil war in this country," he said. "The worry here is that we really don't want a replica of another Charles Taylor in the west African sub-region, not in the near future."

Others have different views. In court, Taylor is accused of abetting and even directing the Revolutionary United Front during Sierra Leone's civil war, a rebel group that gained notoriety for extreme violence, in particular the amputation of the limbs of civilians.

After the war, the RUF metamorphosed from guerrilla group to political party, the RUFP, which is today a rump unit in Sierra Leonean politics. However, the leader of the RUFP, Eldred Collins, remains one of the last public links with the wartime grouping that Taylor is accused of aiding.

"The war in Sierra Leone was not Charles Taylor's war. The war in Sierra Leone was purely a Sierra Leonean war," Collins, dressed in a crisp pink shirt, said in his party's headquarters in eastern Freetown. "My personal perspective is that people should think twice about making the decision that the war in Sierra Leone was fuelled by Taylor."

More tempered than the views of Collins, who was formerly the spokesman of the RUF, are the opinions of the erstwhile rank and file of the war. Many ex-combatants now drive the motorbike taxis known in Sierra Leone as "okadas". Last Tuesday evening a group of okada riders gathered under a makeshift shelter on Spur Loop in western Freetown. "Charles Taylor, he's a person like me," said Mohamed Fofana, 38, a former member of Kamajor wartime civil defence militia, which fought against the RUF. "He was in-between, he good and he bad."

On the other side of the country from Freetown, Kono district in eastern Sierra Leone was the wartime source of Sierra Leone's notorious "blood diamonds". In the town of Koidu, small-time diamond dealer Abdul Karim Daboh resents Charles Taylor in particular for the disruption of his education. "For me, he's the one that destroyed our life," said the 37-year-old, carrying a few small gemstones in a scrap of folded paper. "At that particular time, he destroyed our future. We never attended school again. It was our last attendance."

The truth, though, is that, while the mention of Charles Taylor stirs strong emotions in some quarters, for many Sierra Leoneans the war and the trial are now in the past. People are concerned by the forthcoming presidential election and by the mechanics of staying alive in what remains one of the world's poorest countries. The fact that, unlike the earlier special court prosecutions, the Taylor trial has taken place in The Hague rather than Freetown has also distanced it from public consciousness.

"The war is finished. Everybody in Sierra Leone is doing their own business," said Harold Sesay, 50, who works as a quarantine officer at Lungi airport, which serves Freetown. "Charles Taylor business is not our business now. All that we are after is development. We want our country to develop."

After a fashion, the country is booming. The IMF predicts that the country will experience economic growth of 34.9% this year. The cause is iron ore, and two British companies are behind the development. London Mining is redeveloping an abandoned mine at Lunsar, while African Mineral's larger project focuses on a find at Tonkolili, which the company claims is the world's largest deposit of magnetite.

The iron ore projects will create at most a few tens of thousands of jobs – not enough to relieve the endemic unemployment in a country of six million. However, revenue from royalties and taxation could transform the fortunes of the Sierra Leonean state. At present, the budget of the entire country is little over a paltry $500m (£310m).

Yet there is controversy attached to the iron ore bonanza, too. Neither London Mining nor African Minerals concession agreements conformed to a new mining act Sierra Leone introduced in 2009. London Mining's agreement has since been renegotiated. That of African Minerals has not.

Last week, too, a pay dispute at African Minerals escalated into rioting in the town of Bumbuna in central Sierra Leone. The incident was not the first example of tension between local people and mining companies. The disproportionate response by the police – who recently purchased $4.5m of weaponry, including grenade launchers and heavy machine guns – shows that, while the war is receding into the past, human life is still not always highly valued in Sierra Leone.

On Thursday, after two days of rioting, the fibrous remains of burned tyres lay in the unpaved streets of Bumbuna, along with the remnants of improvised roadblocks. Local people showed spent ammunition casings – 9mm pistol shells and larger rifle rounds – to prove what had taken place, and reported indiscriminate shooting by the security forces. One woman was killed and at least six people were injured. On Thursday night, the injured were at the regional hospital in Makeni, an hour's drive from Bumbuna. There was no light in the wards; nurses said there was no fuel for the generator.

"African Minerals, I think they have to do something," said 26-year-old Sheku Daramy, who had taken a police bullet in the foot. "They should take care of their workers."